The French newspaper Le Monde has published a long article on Teratec, the French supercomputer conference that is taking place this week. Le Monde reports that the French Minister Thierry Mandon said: "France addresses the HPC competition with extraordinary strength and has everything to be in 1st place. It has the technology, infrastructure and it should not be ashamed in a comparison with China and the US. The current contract between the CEA and Atos-Bull around the 'Centre de calcul recherche et technologie' (CCRT), research on quantum supercomputers, the neuromorphic research and artificial intelligence are a priority for the president who promised a budgetary effort."
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Peter Welchering says on Deutschlandfunk that he noted a growing criticism of the EU HPC policy at the ISC conference in Frankfurt. The 1,2 billion euro Human Brain Project for instance, largely a supercomputing project, does not deliver on its promises and is now turning towards classical neural networking techniques. Thes types of large projects are not good for application diversity which was one of the strengths of Europe, Welchering says. He also heard a lot of criticism on the fact that every country has to get its fair share of HPC capacity, even if that means just keeping the existing systems alive and do not do anything new. Welchering also heard criticism on the strong focus on exascale computing. There should be a much broader view on spending research funding. The podcast of the broadcast (in German) is still available.
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